Spike Jonze, Cinema’s Big Kid, Gets a New Playground

Some days, even Spike Jonze goes into an office. One afternoon in late January, he was roaming the open-plan work space on a basement level at Vice Media, the nonconformist content company in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Neatly dressed in glasses and a plaid shirt, Mr. Jonze, the idiosyncratic director of movies like “Being John Malkovich,”“Adaptation” and “Her” (which won him an Academy Award for its screenplay), was glancing at the computer screens of row after row of young content producers in more bohemian attire, reviewing their scripts and video edits.

Only a few weeks remained until Monday, Feb. 29, when the on-switch will be flipped at Viceland, a new cable channel that will be available in about 70 million homes. It seeks to distill the seize-the-day spirit of Vice into a lineup of new programs, mostly documentary shows with engaging hosts, from Vice’s publications and the wider world of pop culture, who think, eat and smoke their way through unfamiliar terrain. Its further challenge is to deliver a target audience of 18-to-29-year-old viewers who have been abandoning traditional TV in ever-growing numbers.

On his wanderings this afternoon, Mr. Jonze, who is the co-president of Viceland (as well as creative director and a partner at Vice), received an assessment from the network’s general manager, Guy Slattery, on what tasks remained on their to-do list.

All they had left to accomplish, Mr. Slattery told him, were just a few small things. They had to “make sure all the shows get in, and get made and delivered and approved — then it’s getting the stuff on air and how we schedule it.”

Asked later if he and his colleagues could realistically meet so many goals, Mr. Jonze responded with an untroubled chuckle.

“Those are conversations we should have had, like, six months ago,” he said, in an excitable voice that sounded more like a college intern’s than a 46-year-old filmmaker’s. “But now we’re like, ‘O.K., so how does a TV channel work?’ We’re fully figuring it out as we go.”

As surely as Mr. Jonze appreciates the demands of building a cable network from scratch, he also understands how strange it is that a career spent avoiding predictable choices would lead him to such a seemingly button-down role.

“The fact that I’m a TV executive, quote-unquote, is ridiculous,” he said.

But it is also an assignment that underscores the leadership skills that Mr. Jonze — a onetime skate punk and enduring prankster — is not always recognized for, as well as his desire to give opportunities to fledgling artists.

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Ellen Page and Ian Daniel in “Gaycation.”CreditViceland

“Whether this stuff is successful, people watch or don’t watch, I want to believe it,” he said with unapologetic earnestness. “I want to trust it. I think that’s what our mission has been.”

These earliest offerings include “Gaycation,” in which the actress Ellen Page (“Juno”) explores L.G.B.T.Q. culture around the world; “Weediquette,” which expands on the journalist Krishna Andavolu’s chronicles of marijuana and its uses; and a cuisine series featuring the husky hip-hop star Action Bronson (it has an obscene title whose last two words are “That’s Delicious”).

Mr. Jonze, who has helped to develop all of Viceland’s programming, said that what ultimately united these programs were hosts with genuine passion for the stories they are telling.

“There’s no veneer or pretending to be something else,” he said. “That’s all I care about. When you watch something, whether it’s a TV show or movie, in the first 10 minutes, you know if you trust it or not. The filmmaker is entirely responsible for that.”

The same philosophy could summarize the work of Mr. Jonze, who has variously been a founder of a skateboarding company; an editor of youth culture magazines like Dirt and Grand Royal; a director of innovative music videos for Beastie Boys, Björk and Fatboy Slim; and a creator of MTV’s comic stunt series “Jackass.”

He was well into his feature-filmmaking career when he befriended Vice executives including Shane Smith, its pugnacious co-founder, and Eddy Moretti, its chief creative officer and Mr. Jonze’s co-president at Viceland.

About a decade ago, Mr. Jonze encouraged the company to document more of its gonzo journalism on video — “I kept saying, ‘You guys are going around the world, doing these insane stories, buying dirty bombs in Bulgaria or wherever, bring a camera’” — and create an Internet channel called VBS.tv.

Today, Vice is a significant player in the world of online video, and has its own self-titled HBO series as well as a daily news broadcast it is preparing for that channel. (These are separate projects, unrelated to Mr. Jonze’s involvement in Viceland.)

It also caught the attention of A&E Networks about two years ago, at a time when that media company was looking to upend its own cable portfolio. Last November, it was announced that A&E would clean the slate at its struggling H2 channel and reinvent it as Viceland. (A&E Networks owns 51 percent of Viceland and Vice Media owns the remaining 49 percent; A&E also has a minority stake in Vice.)

Nancy Dubuc, the president and chief executive of A&E Networks, said that “of course” she had some hesitation working with a Vice team that had no previous experience running a television channel. But what gave her confidence in the partnership was the value of the Vice brand.

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Krishna Andavolu in “Weediquette.”CreditViceland

“We’re here to help, wherever they need to lean on us,” Ms. Dubuc said. “It’s their vision to find and nurture the next generation of storytellers that will make this channel a home.”

For the past 18 months, Mr. Jonze has helped oversee the building of Viceland’s infrastructure. He has also been speaking widely to people at Vice and beyond to find creators and hosts for its shows.

Some of these conversations led to friends like Ms. Page, who was staying at Mr. Jonze’s New York home while she worked on a movie when he presented her with a proposition.

“He basically was like, ‘Yeah, we’re launching a network — if you have any TV ideas, let me know,’” Ms. Page recalled. Within a day, she said, she gave him the idea for “Gaycation.”

Beyond the series itself, Ms. Page said Mr. Jonze has supplied crucial suggestions — for example, that she travel on the show with her friend Ian Daniel — and encouragement to put more of her personality into the show.

“It’s the last thing I want,” Ms. Page explained. “I think I get neurotic — anything like that will mean it’s somehow self-involved.”

As a mentor, Ms. Page said, Mr. Jonze has influenced her with his ideas and by his example. “He’s so meticulous,” she said, “but he always keeps you excited and wants you to feel safe and taken care of — to feel the freedom to do what you want to do.”

Mr. Andavolu, a former editor at Vice and Vice.com, admitted to being star-struck by Mr. Jonze when he first pitched him on a “Weediquette” TV series.

Instead, Mr. Andavolu said Mr. Jonze was more interested in hearing his anecdote about telling his crestfallen mother that he smoked marijuana on camera while standing next to the then-president of Uruguay, José Mujica.

“Spike was like, ‘You’re exploring these aspects of what’s acceptable and what’s not, through a very personal lens,’” Mr. Andavolu said.

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Spike JonzeCreditPhilip Montgomery for The New York Times

Mr. Jonze’s input on “Weediquette,” which begins with another interaction between the host and his mother, has made it “a lot more human,” Mr. Andavolu said.

“I’m a guy with a mom,” he added. “A very disappointed mom.”

At Vice, Mr. Jonze popped into the office he shares with Mr. Moretti, who was watching other Viceland shows with Tom Freston and Judy McGrath, television executives who had overseen MTV for some 30 years. (Mr. Freston is also a Vice board member.)

After watching some of the stand-up comedy performances in a Viceland show called “Flophouse,” Mr. Jonze seemed invigorated. “There’s probably like 20 people that I want to make shows with,” he said.

Mr. Moretti said afterward that, after having worked closely on the Viceland launch for a year and a half, there was no expectation that Mr. Jonze “needs to be there from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day for the next three years.”

Now, Mr. Moretti said, “He gets to stand up at the edge of the precipice and start pointing — ‘Go there, go there.’”

Mr. Jonze may come across as more laid-back than assertive, but whether he is working on his movies or setting up a cable channel, he said all of these projects require the exertion of his authority but “every authority takes a different form.”

In a distinctly Jonzian way, he explained that his role at Viceland was “as much about the voice and vision of what the channel should be” as creating “this living machine that enables these ideas to get created and seen — this organism that we’re getting to create and live inside of.”

Many years ago, Mr. Jonze said, MTV had approached him about taking over its programming; he dreamed up wild ideas like letting viewers submit their own content through VHS tapes and voice mail, but instead he went off to direct “Being John Malkovich.” (Some of these ideas are revisited on Viceland, in the channel’s “Vice Lab” program and interstitial segments.)

Still, the desire remains for him to create a platform so forward-thinking that it can make him obsolete.

“I’m 46 and I’m probably one of the oldest people in this building,” Mr. Jonze said. “As soon as I can give this to the younger inmates, then it truly is the inmates running the asylum.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: Cinema’s Big Kid Gets a New Playground. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe